Rejoice Amiga gamers as we've just had an exclusive heads up from our friends PixelGlass, of the first Survival Mode Demo Preview v0.2 for their upcoming commercial Amiga game ' Alarcity '. You may have enjoyed the recent remastered/overhaul release of Giana Sisters Special Edition by a new label called Reimagine Games who dealt with the free side of hacks and remakes. But this latest action/shoot em up by the commercial side PixelGlass was assembled for the upcoming Retro Komp retro gamedev competition.

Congrats on Your work I find survival mode very addicting. Your game is awesome and I hope You will finish it. I believe some stuff could be tweaked bit more.
I die two-three times very fast and than I learn that constant moving and shooting is key to long live game could be bit more hard with additional gun parameter like range. I would love to see also more gun power levels. I think game could start with even bit lower level of gun power. That feeling when group of those slime/ghost follow You and You are constant shooting is great.
Another idea is to introduce more money items - like silver coin that gives player 1$, golden coin = 2$, gem =5$, very rare gem =10$.
Also more colorful ghost , maybe special ghost types that can do different stuff. Ghost that can teleport, become invisible for short amount of time, heavy armor ghost, ghost that split into two smaller ghosts when shoot

@ Neil: thanks a lot for the support, much appreciate it!
@ Gzegokla: Thanks for the tips! (will go in detail about them later on)

First, a few words about the new release and the project in general:

Stage 1: Where we are now
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As you've (already) read from Neil's article we've just released the first demo of our upcoming commercial game named 'AlarCity'. This demo is a preview of the Survival Mode (that will also feature in the complete game) and gives you a first glimpse of the fastest, most frentic (yet highly strategic) arcade shooting action you've seen in Amiga in recent years! All with fine AGA pixel art, 50hz smooth scrolling, cool sounds and a ton of enemies, projectiles & fx on screen!

This demo version was created for the needs of the upcoming Rertocomp and as such we had an extremely narrow window of time to pull it off (just around 20 days in fact, to go from a very basic tile engine we had, to this current outcome).
Yet, we managed not only to provide a working prototype but an actual feature complete (on it's own), standalone version, designed to give you -hopefully- hours of fun and addictive gameplay!

Having said that, this current, free and standalone 0.2 demo version is -as I already mentioned- only a glimpse of what will come next! In fact we are planning to continue supporting and expanding it up to v1.0. A few stuff we're hoping to fit in until then:
- More enemy types (passive, small, shooting, mini boss)
- More explosion and other effects
- More powerups
- Screen effects
- Better compatibility and memory performance
- More varied gameplay
- Better enemies progression calibration
- Various other fixes

Once we reach this stage and the final, free Survival Mode Demo v1.0 is released, as a next step we will initiate pre-sales (or some kind of early access) for the full and final game. We're currently looking into the exact pricing and model we'll follow, so this info is to be announced in due time!

In the mean time, we'll continue expanding the Survival mode (along with the planned Campaign or Story mode), but further updates will only be avaiable to the pre-sale owners.

Stage 3 : Physical product
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Besides the digital downloads, we'd very much like to be able and produce a high quality boxed version of the game. As with the pre-orders, we'll announce any news about this one when the time comes.

Bonus Stage
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Everyone who purchases a pre-sales ticket and those kind souls that will decide to donate (really, your support is most important!) will be credited not only at the game box (if eventually made) but also IN game, either at the end credits or (possibly) somewhere within the various stages (heh, we're gonna see about that!)

- More upgrades and upgrade types are planned, yes.
- We've got already a very detailed plan and a list for different enemy types and enemy behaviours! F.e. the armored and the enemy that splits into smaller ghosts is already on that list! Very cool ideas with the teleporting and invisible ones! We might implement those also
- There will be definitely more collectables though it's not our no1 priority to add more money items (but who knows, we'll see about that)!